The Death of an Ambitious Woman (15 page)

For hours that night, Ruth hung between waking and sleeping. She’d come home in a daze, overwhelmed by what she’d done. No one in the family seemed to notice her quietness, beguiled as they were by the computer, the television, and the incessant beeping of Sarah’s cell phone.

Ruth hated impulse. Raised by one impulsive woman, and sister to another, Ruth believed their spontaneity had brought them far more sorrow than joy. Yet tonight, when she was so close to reaching her dream of being chief, she had careened recklessly, dangerously, criminally, down a street in the town whose laws she was sworn to uphold.

At midnight, Ruth went to bed, but not to sleep. Picturing Carson Kendall alone in his sandbox, she thought about what it would do to Sarah and James to have their mother suddenly yanked from their young lives—and worse, through her own stupidity.

Ruth tossed, turned over, and looked at the clock. Two
A
.
M
. Three
A
.
M
. Four. She needed to be sharp in the morning. Beside her, Marty stirred in reaction to her movement.

At quarter to five, Ruth got up. She was one of the first people in New Derby to know the spell of fine weather was over. A steady rain fell from the night sky. She pulled on a pair of sweats and met the paper deliveryman on the porch, startling him so badly he nearly lost his footing. She went back in the house and put on a pot of coffee.

She briefly considered surprising the family with bacon and eggs on a Saturday, but told herself to get a grip. The greatest kindness she could do her loved ones was to be out of the house before they awoke.

Ruth sat at her desk and dug into the reports she’d thrown into her briefcase the night before but never looked at. The clouds outside colored her office in shades of gray, so she worked in the circle of light provided by a single lamp. The reports, flat words on paper, filled-in spaces, and check marks, gave her the comfort they always had. The frantic misery of her sleepless night began to recede. Two-thirds of the way through the pile, she came upon the inventory of the possessions from Tracey Kendall’s car. Ruth tucked it under her arm and headed for the property room.

In the basement, Ruth wasn’t pleased to see the young

property officer reading
Car and Driver.
She knew the property job was loaded with hours of boredom, especially so early on a weekend morning. She was also sure if she checked, she would find cataloging, filing, and reporting to be done. Ruth made a mental note to speak to his supervisor.

The clerk took Ruth’s signature and badge number and buzzed her in. Ruth removed Tracey Kendall’s property from its shelf and headed to the farthest of the old cells. Moving to the center table, she carefully arranged the articles that had made Tracey Kendall’s final journey.

After Ruth’s initial examination, Moscone had searched Tracey Kendall’s property meticulously and found nothing. Nothing at all. Yet, too many people in this case were looking for something. Tracey’s study had been searched. Stephen Kendall had emptied Tracey’s office at Fiske & Holden two days after her death. And both Stephen Kendall and Jack Holden had asked repeatedly about the property in Tracey Kendall’s car. Ruth was sure the objects in front of her would tell a story, if only she knew how to hear it.

Ruth sifted through the clothing in the gym bag, but couldn’t change her original assessment. These were comfort clothes. Clothes a wealthy woman, with closets full of suits and drawers of designer underwear, couldn’t bear to leave behind. Ruth searched the pockets of the jeans, flannel work shirt, and cardigan, but found exactly what Moscone had—nothing.

She opened the briefcase and looked through the papers. They didn’t interest her much. The industry reports and financial newsletters were rapidly becoming obsolete and would soon be as useless to everyone as they were now to Tracey Kendall.

Next, Ruth turned to the laptop. Baines controlled access to the Computer Forensics Lab, so Ruth would get no help from it. Moscone had tried every obvious password they could think of, but now Ruth had new information. She adjusted the cursor on the screen and typed, “MaryAnn,” Tracey Kendall’s birth name. Ruth was prepared to try every variation on the name, including those for capitalization, and then to try every permutation again with “Noonan” added on the end, but on this first try, the computer whirred and Tracey Kendall’s desktop icons appeared.

Ruth scanned the directories on the hard drive, learning nothing. She read the titles of the word-processing files, spot checking them against the documents they represented, and learned Tracey was a precise and articulate labeler. The document appeared to be, in every case, exactly what the title described. Then Ruth checked the folders containing stored e-mails, faxes, and on-line database information. Zip. Zero. Zed.

Finally, she set the screen to the on-line Fiske & Holden schedule. With no one to access and download new information, it remained as it had been at the moment of Tracey Kendall’s death. The real schedule, back at Fiske & Holden, was being updated continuously as the six remaining employees went on with their business lives, but the version on Tracey Kendall’s computer was frozen in time.

Ruth turned her attention to the leather personal organizer. She found it to be marvelously methodical. Every meeting on the calendar had a corresponding summary in the Notes section. Each of the action items from the meetings was neatly transferred to the To Do list where it could be checked off as done or delegated with a date assigned. Scheduled outcomes, such as calls or follow-up meetings were transferred back to the calendar. The final section, the directory, had all the names, addresses, phone and fax numbers that would be needed. The To Do list section was a mix of business and family. “Carson—new pants” appeared below “Finalize decision on Belton Ind. w/Jack.” Ruth shook her head at the completeness of the system.

Ruth read backwards through the daily calendar. On March fifteenth, she found the notation, “mainten—SUV.” By the time she reached the mid-February dates, Ruth had found three Tuesday afternoons that bore the notation, “Susan G. here.” with a line traveling through the next two days, confirming Susan Gleason came up every few weeks, as she had said. The calendar noted several rounds of parties, some given, some attended. Those given often had corresponding guest lists and menus in the Notes section which resulted in “to calls” and “to buys” in the To Do’s. Ruth searched in vain for a friend’s name that popped up frequently enough to imply intimacy, but there was none. Fran Powell’s name appeared here and there on a guest or “to call” list, but sometimes weeks went by without it being mentioned.

Ruth stared dejectedly at the items on the table. What wasn’t she seeing? She decided there was nothing left to do but compare the on-line schedule to the calendar in the organizer, to see if omissions emerged in one place or the other. She flipped the pages and the screen back to the day of Tracey Kendall’s murder and started to work.

McGrath pulled into the headquarters parking lot at eight-thirty. Since his wife had left, he often came to the station at odd hours. He enjoyed the calm rhythms of the detective squad room during the quiet shifts, and the truth was, after he’d eaten his breakfast and thumbed through the paper, there wasn’t much else to do.

McGrath stopped on the way upstairs. “Not too busy,” he commented to the officer behind the front desk.

The officer nodded. “The hooligans sleep in on the weekend, not like us working stiffs.”

“Who’s around?” McGrath asked carefully.

“The chief’s down in the property room.”

This was unexpected. “Just what I need. Whatever you do, don’t tell her I’m here.”

In the detectives’ squad room, McGrath pulled off his seedy sport coat and spread the tangible remains of Al Pace’s financial life out on the table. Something was here and McGrath knew it. Somewhere amid the shut-off orders and final notices, there was something. He hadn’t looked hard enough, made the right connections. He settled in to work.

Ruth paused and rubbed her eyes. The laptop screen wasn’t designed for extended viewing. The fluorescent light hanging over the little cell’s table didn’t help matters. Ruth had worked back, comparing the on-line schedule to the personal organizer from the day Tracey died in April to mid-February.

The two calendars were indeed different, but so far, those differences had told her nothing. In the electronic version, Tracey accounted for her whereabouts during normal business hours, even if she was using personal time, for example “chiropract. appt.” She also included meetings conducted outside of business hours, such as dinners with clients or networking breakfasts. The calendar in the organizer was much richer. It duplicated the on-line entries, but also contained more personal information: art world dinner parties in New York, meetings with Carson’s preschool teacher, weekend hairdresser appointments.

As Ruth worked through the calendar, she looked for signs of an affair. Now she couldn’t imagine Tracey having one without dates for the rendezvous appearing somewhere in her organizer. What had really happened? In the beginning, Ruth had been pulled into Moscone’s theory because she needed to establish a connection between Tracey Kendall and Al Pace, and, though she had a hard time admitting this, because Pace was such a handsome man. But no one seemed to have any knowledge of the affair except Fran Powell. Did the affair even matter? If Pace was hired to kill Tracey, he’d used his relationship as her mechanic, not his relationship as her lover, to do her in.

The left-hand pile of calendar pages was growing thinner. Where was the smoking gun, the precipitating event Ruth knew must be here? The kind of murder they were investigating, murder for hire, required planning and timing, but how far could the trigger be from the explosion? Two months was a long time to wait when you wanted to get rid of someone. Of course, it was always possible the event, whatever it was, had been spontaneous, and therefore not on the calendar.

Ruth rubbed her eyes again. When she looked up, John McGrath was standing in the cell doorway, shirt sleeves rolled up and reading glasses perched on his nose.

“This is important,” he said, skipping the pleasantries. “In February somebody gave Pace five thousand dollars in cash.”

“What?” Ruth’s voice was louder than she intended.

“I almost missed it. The money was never deposited, but a bunch of bills were paid, all on the same day. He must have paid them in cash.”

Ruth was stunned. “What are you saying? We’ve been working on the premise that the accident, the original five thousand dollar payment, and Pace’s disappearance are all related. If there’s another source for the money, we’re right back to criminal negligence where we started.”

“That’s what I thought, too. So I checked. Sure enough, there was an invoice from Screw Loose to Kevin Chun dated February twelfth, the day all these payments were made.”

“Pace was at Fiske & Holden that day. Maybe the murder was supposed to take place then?”

“Yeah,” McGrath added. “Maybe this five thousand represents the down payment. The balance didn’t get paid until Mrs. Kendall finally died.”

Excited, Ruth opened Tracey’s organizer to February twelfth. No car appointment appeared. On January thirteenth, there was one that said, “mainten—sports car,” and Ruth had already seen the entry about the SUV on March fifteenth. “Damn, that’s not it.”

“Slow down,” McGrath cautioned. “Think about it. Was Tracey’s car scheduled for maintenance on the day she was killed?” “No.” “And she wasn’t scheduled on February twelfth, either.”

Ruth furrowed her brow. “He must have thought it would look less suspicious if he did it on a day when he wasn’t scheduled to work on her car.”

“Bingo.”

“So why didn’t Pace kill her in February?”

“Something went wrong. Did Mrs. Kendall pull her disappearing act in February, the one Brenda O’Reilly told Moscone about?”

“No, earlier. January.”

McGrath shrugged. “Maybe Tracey was out of town or just away from the office when Pace came.”

“In any case,” Ruth theorized, “whatever started this chain of events happened before February twelfth.” McGrath nodded and started to move away. Ruth held up a hand. “Stay here.”

McGrath got a chair from the cell next door and sat at the table next to Ruth. With two people working at it, the comparison of the calendar in the organizer with the on-line schedule went much faster. The pages on the left side of the organizer quickly dwindled to a few.

“Damn it,” Ruth cursed when she came to the final two pages of the calendar representing the first week of the new year. Then, suddenly, there it was, in Tracey Kendall’s neat handwriting. A morning meeting on January third, a meeting that wasn’t in Tracey’s electronic schedule.

McGrath shut down the computer and returned Tracey Kendall’s property to its box. Ruth picked up the receiver of the phone hanging on the old cell wall and punched in a number.

Ruth felt a fleeting moment of self-consciousness about her sneakers and jeans when she entered the sleek lobby of the Boston office tower that housed the Wilson Brenner law firm. But on a Saturday the lobby was deserted, except for a sleepy-eyed guard at the security desk who waved her in.

When the elevator opened into the reception area on the twenty-third floor, Ruth had the eerie sensation she had traveled not vertically, but through time. In the building’s lobby she had caught a final glimpse of the sleek marble and clean lines of the beginning of the twenty-first century. Now, she was standing in a room that would have been comfortable for anyone visiting a solicitor at the end of the nineteenth. Someone had gone to enormous trouble and expense in disassembling, reassembling, and installing the burnished burl walnut paneling and cherry flooring that graced the oversized reception area. Ruth shuddered at the thought of all those billable hours.

The dark wooden doors off the reception area were locked, as Ruth had been told they would be. Following directions, she entered a small alcove, picked up the wall phone, punched in an extension number and waited, yawning. The sleepless night was taking its toll. She hoped she had the edge required for this meeting.